Semaphore Uncut

If you need to cover a distance of 30 kilometers, you can walk for 6 hours. Or you can learn how to drive a car and get there in 30. That’s what Shai Reznik, Test Effective Coach, learned the hard way. He worked so hard trying to juggle a 9-to-5 job with growing a startup that he got a panic attack. In the end, he decided automated what could be automated, including testing, is the only way to sta...

How do people end up in test automation? Is it a skill people can learn at universities or it’s more of a vocation, really? There is no one path that leads to QA. What’s more important is that testing is just a subset of quality assurance. There're so many aspects to think about when people talk about signing anything off from a QA perspective. In the most recent episode of Semaphore Uncut, w...

There's so much more to testing than just writing automated tests that run in CI. Testers on high-performing teams don't just write tests. They work closely with site reliability engineers, ensuring that the infrastructure is tested as well. They get involved in production.  But how does one introduce this holistic approach to testing to one's team? Even more so, how does one introd...

When your engineering team grows from 10 to 100 engineers in the course of a year, there are so many things that you need to focus on, from operations and developer tooling to testing. Maintaining the health of the application is perhaps the most difficult part of all. Where exactly do you start? We sat down with Justin Searls , the co-founder and CTO of the Test Double agency. For many years, Jus...

In this podcast episode, we welcome Richard Kasperowski . Richard is an author, teacher, speaker, and coach focused on team building and high-performance teams. Richard is the author of two books, High-Performance Teams: The Foundations and The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness , as well as the forthcoming book High-Performance Teams: Core Protocols for Psychological Safety and Emotional Intell...

In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, we welcome Aslak Hellesøy , Cucumber Founder, Cucumber Open Source Lead at SmartBear . We walk about TDD and BDD, how to adopt automated testing, what different kinds of tests there are, and what the future holds for Cucumber.  What we talked about , in more detail: Introduction The differences between TDD and BDD How developer communities evolve What is Cucumbe...

In this podcast episode, I welcome Emily Bache , technical agile coach, author of " Technical Agile Coaching with the Samman Method " and " The Coding Dojo Handbook ". We talk about agile coaching, the Samman Method, peer reviews and various communication techniques and methods. Listen to our insightful conversation or read the edited transcript.  What we talked about: The Codi...

In this podcast episode, I welcome Kris Buytaert, consulting CTO at Inuits.eu , one of the organisers of DevOpsDays . We talk about the conference, how to introduce CI/CD to teams, and what some patterns and antipatterns for infrastructure as code are. We also discuss why teams are reluctant to spend money on testing and operations, and what happens if they don't. Listen to the full conversat...

In this podcast episode, I welcome with Jan Giacomelli , Staff Software Engineer at Ren Systems , previously with typlessAPI . We talked about test-driven development, unit tests, flaky tests, and much more. Jan shares some exciting war stories from the trenches of testing, explains how he was able to reduce the feedback loop from 45 minutes to only 8 min, and advocates for TDD. Listen to our insi...

In this podcast episode, I welcome David Burns , Head of OSPO at BrowserStack , Chair person for the W3C Browser Testing and Tools Working Group , core contributor on the Selenium Open Source Project . We talk about the past, present and future of browser testing, how to eradicate flaky tests and why it's important to invest more effort into testing pyramid from the very beginning. Key points...

In this podcast episode, I welcome Amjad Masad , co-founder and CEO of Replit , the collaborative browser-based IDE. We talk about how Replit started, the technologies behind the product, but also how accessible tools change lives and help to make programming a passion. Key highlights: Making accessible tools as a life goal Replit doing magic The technical side of Replit What happens when you star...

In this podcast episode, I welcome Gleb Bahmutov , Senior Director of Engineering at Mercari . We talk about about Gleb's engineering experience at Cypress.io and Mercari US, discuss the testing pyramid and why it makes little sense, and talk about what we can use instead. Here's what we talk about: Gleb's story with Cypress.io Testing pyramid makes little sense; what can we use ins...

In this episode, I welcome Adam Gordon Bell , Developer Advocate at Earthly , host of CoRecursive podcast . We talk about what Earthly is and how teams can adopt it. We discuss whether being a late adopter is a good or bad thing. Adam also shares his experience with starting his own podcast. What’s in the episode: Introduction to Earthly When do you want to start using Earthly? What technologies E...

In this episode, I welcome Keith Smiley , Principal Engineer and Lead Maintainer of Bazel's iOS support at Lyft . We talk about how the Lyft team is using Bazel and what the advantages are of using this build tool. Keith also shares his team's experience with the Bazel adoption. Key takeaways: How the Lyft team is using Bazel and monorepos How Lyft adopted Bazel How the Lyft team maintai...

In this episode, I welcome Adam Bradley , co-creator of Ionic Framework and StencilJS , currently with Builder.io . We chat about Ionic and Stencil, Adam's new projects Qwik and Partytown as well as how Builder.io works and how is it different from other drag and drop website builders. Key takeaways: What is Ionic? How StencilJS was born Making fast websites with Builder.io The challenges in...

In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, we welcome Jeffrey Fredrick , co-author of Agile Conversations, organizer of CITCON . 🎧 What we talked about: How CITCON Conference was born How to bring business metrics to microservices Technology adoption lifecycle Is Agile dead? The art of productive conflict and the Four R's framework About Semaphore Uncut In each episode of Semaphore Uncut, we invite...

In this episode of Semaphore Uncut we welcome Filip Hraček , developer relations engineer at Google, and talk about what's great about Flutter, how to out as a developer, and the importance of keeping your motivation up. 🎧 Key takeaways: The art of finishing projects The pros and cons of tinkering with side projects How to keep motivation up and keep learning What are unicorn developers? Thi...

Today we have Eric Bowman, CTO at TomTom, former VP Engineering at Zalando, and a developer behind the game "The Sims". In this episode, we discuss how mapping technology has changed the world and how CI/CD practices have made real-time mapping possible.  🎧 Key Takeaways How long before self-driving cars are a reality? How satellite and map technology changed the world? The challenges o...

Brandon Bayer talks about his creation, Blitz.js, a Next.js fork and a fullstack, batteries-included framework for React. In this episode, we talk about the inspiration for the project, the challenges along the way and what's planned for this great framework's future. Listen to the episode now. 🎧 Key Takeaways   What is Blitz.js and how it relates to React. JavaScript or TypeScript, whi...

Welcome to Semaphore Uncut, a podcast about developers building great products. In this episode, I talk with Peter Cooper, tech publisher, author, software engineer, and of the most successful newsletter curators. Press the play button and listen to us talking about content creation, the cycles in the tech business, and how developers learn. Key Takeaways Using a email as the core driver for a bus...

This episode features John Clingan , product manager at Red Hat , founder of MicroProfile , and co-author of " Kubernetes Native Microservices with Quarkus, and MicroProfile ". We'll talk about the challenges of developing microservices on Java, using Quarkus and MicroProfile to speed up start times and reduce memory footprints, and how to transition into a Kubernetes-native experie...

Today's episode features Khash Sajadi , founder of Cloud 66 and hardy DevOps veteran. Listen to us talking about how DevOps evolved and shaped the industry, the importance of getting past the hype, and what to look for when deciding on a technology stack. Key takeaways: How DevOps technologies evolved over the last 30 years. What made Kubernetes win the container wars. How to sell DevOps serv...

In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, Jeff Smith , DevOps advocate, director of Ops at Centro, and author of the book Operations Anti-patterns, DevOps Solutions , talks about adapting DevOps patterns and avoiding pitfalls as companies grow out from startup to full size. We talk about the types of engineers companies need as they evolve and how to achieve the right balance between letting your engine...

In this episode of Semaphore Uncut, I talk with Dave Thomas , author of The Pragmatic Programmer , and many other well-known software engineering books. We discuss how software engineering has changed over many decades and how Dave's experiences have informed his attitudes to testing . Key takeaways: Software is both abstract and changes the real world Computer science undergrads need more in...

This episode of Semaphore Uncut features Jonathan Creamer , Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft . We hear his monorepo experiences and about his work in the field of 'DivOps' - the term he coined to describe the engineering of front-end tooling. Key takeaways: DivOps is DevOps for the front-end Monorepo's power is having all dependencies at your fingertips Make and test sweeping c...